By Miguel Sorans, leader of Socialist Left and IWU-FI
We reproduce the talk, unabridged and corrected, given by Miguel Sorans on Thursday 30 January, organised by the Socialist Left Youth (SLY), youth of the Argentine section of the IWU-FI. Days later, Trump launched a trade war, imposing tariffs on imports from Mexico, Canada, and China. It was short-lived because within 24 hours he suspended the tariffs on Mexico and Canada. Announcing a plan to expel Palestinians and relocate them, he said the U.S. would control Gaza. We will own it. He added they could send troops into Gaza, turning it into the ‘Riviera of the Middle East’. Millions around the world, starting with the Palestinian people, came out to repudiate him. Sorans’ talk dealt with these issues, including the causes of the growth of the far right in the world and the need to mobilise to defeat it.
The question of the second Donald Trump’s government, recently in office, is a matter of concern for the mass movement in the USA and all over the world. To the question of the call ‘What can we expect from the new Donald Trump administration?’, the answer could be simple: we cannot expect anything good for working people, women, youth, and the peoples of the world.
But we need to dig deeper to see what and how we confront this imperialist right-winger. It is also true what the flyer said ‘we have already seen this film’ because this bigot already ruled the USA between 2016 and 2020. This remake will be more reactionary, repressive, interventionist, and dangerous.
But why? Why did Trump change? No. We believe that what changes or advances is the decadence of the imperialist capitalist world system, which leads to a greater crisis of the capitalist economy, more clashes and inter-bourgeois friction and provokes greater social inequality and higher levels of poverty. Trump’s policies could involve more military action, IMF support, and aggressive debt collection.
US and global imperialism, facing economic crisis, deepen social cuts and restrictions.
But they cannot overcome their economic crisis because the working class and the masses continue to resist the onslaught of the governments, the multinationals, and the IMF.
Trump himself recognised this decline because, in his inauguration speech, among all his bravado, he decreed: ‘the decline of the USA is over’. And he announced that the ‘golden age’ was beginning. That remains to be seen.
Trump’s ‘chainsaw’ will cause more social crisis in the USA
So, he came in with a tremendous battery of decrees to provoke, sooner than later, a tremendous social crisis in the United States, more poverty in the United States and the world.
You know that in the US there is a tradition that when presidents sign important laws, they give the pen to important personalities. As with President Lyndon B. Johnson, who, in 1965, gave Martin Luther King the pen with which he signed the Civil Rights Act, in particular the right to vote for people of colour. Now Trump uses markers, so that his signature stands out, and throws them to the audience as if they were little balls in a football stadium.
What’s even worse, Trump’s first decrees take away rights. They took away health insurance from millions of poor people in the US who live on the streets or have no jobs, which can lead to their death. They have cancelled the budget for social programmes, for sexual diversity, for the energy transition. They cancelled the transgender quota in the armed forces. It decreed the existence of two genders in American society, male-female. He withdrew the US from the WHO and from the Paris climate agreement. He threatened to take over the Panama Canal and Greenland and with military interventions if he didn’t get them.
He is going to give his unconditional support to the State of Israel’s Zionist criminals in the meeting with Netanyahu in the White House, to support their genocide of the Palestinian people and to make new threats of future military aggressions in the Middle East. He talks about ending the war in Ukraine by pretending the Ukrainian people surrender to Putin, the criminal invader.
He pardoned 1500 fascists who had stormed the Capitol in 2021 and have been imprisoned ever since.
But not everything is going his way. He decreed, for example, the barbarity of taking away the citizenship of those born in the USA, from immigrants’ parents. After 24 hours, he could not apply this decree because a judge of the bourgeois justice system blocked it. And there are already attorneys general of 22 states who are making the same demand. This mega decree does not respect the bourgeois constitution of the USA, because the 14th amendment guarantees the right of citizenship independent of the immigration status of the parents.
And some of the other decrees are no longer in force, because Trump himself had to withdraw them because of complaints and protests that include Republican senators and congressional representative. He had to cancel the removal of subsidies for social programmes. One of these, for example, took away health care for the hundreds of thousands of people living on the streets and those without jobs.
The attack on immigrants and its contradictions
It remains to be seen what will happen to one of the most explosive axes, Trump’s hobbyhorse, the expulsion of millions of immigrants from the USA. Even the few he sent back to their countries of origin were in handcuffs. Of course, this situation is surreal. The USA was a country open to immigrants, like all countries in America. In older different time; the immigrants were Irish or Italian. In the 20th and 21st centuries, millions of Mexicans and Latin Americans, who, because of the miserable conditions imposed by imperialism on their countries, are looking for a way out by going to the North. These immigrants are exploited because it is nothing new that millions of Mexicans, Hondurans, Central Americans, Venezuelans, Argentinians, Chileans, and Uruguayans work for poverty wages.
Trump’s racist and anti-immigrant discourse has little basis in reality or application. It is discourse. In the USA, as part of the capitalist decadence, ‘the American dream’ has failed. These far-right ideas are not new: it is also in Europe, the ‘immigrants are to blame’.
Trump announced he will make ‘the biggest deportation in history’. We will also see how it ends. He said that in the first few days, he would throw out a million. There is still no report that he has thrown out a million. For now, there is talk of thousands.
It is the employers who have been warning Trump, even before he took office, to be careful about what he is going to do. Because a large part of the bosses, small or large, starting with McDonald’s, have super profits by paying starvation wages to immigrants, and even more so to undocumented immigrants.
The big bosses of the countryside, of agricultural work in California, in the western United States, have alerted Trump to this problem. Because in California, for example, 100 per cent of almonds and walnuts are produced. The United States produces the most almonds in the world. Agriculture in this state is a vast industry covering 400 varieties of crops, from the vegetable fields of the south to the vineyards of the north, and worth billions of dollars a year.
But who works there? The bosses said: ‘we have 2.4 million workers who work in nuts and almonds, but half of them are undocumented, and on lower wages. 1.2 million are undocumented workers. The employers have said, if we stop having these 1.5 million people, production will collapse and our profits and our companies will collapse’.
Other critical voices have added: ‘Any plan to carry out mass deportations would be devastating for both the agricultural industry and consumers, because any disruption in the industry would drive up prices when workers are already worried about inflation,’ says Edward Orozco Flores, faculty director of the Centre for Community and Work at the University of California, Merced, in a call (El País, 16 November 2024).
So, he’s going to dump millions? He said he would send a million a year and, for now, but it hasn’t happened yet. Two hundred people have arrived in Colombia, another 200 in Honduras, another one in Brazil. We don’t know yet if they have reached ten thousand. Trump announced that 30,000 beds would be set up to send to Guantánamo. Quite a show, even if he is taking some imprisoned migrants to Guantánamo. Street protests by immigrants against detentions and deportation attempts have already begun.
The policy of capitalism and the US bourgeois governments, whether Democrat or Republican, has always been double-talk: let in immigrants to keep millions, 30 or 40 years ago, exploit them and sometimes expel them to justify themselves.
Neither Republicans nor Trump hold the record of expulsion. The latter is at the bottom of the leader board. Obama and Biden reportedly held the record. Obama expelled three million immigrants in his eight years, at an average of 375,000 per year. The annual record breaker was Biden in 2024, when he kicked out 700,000. Now, what numbers do we have for Trump’s years in office? He only expelled 250,000 people in four years.
So, the reality of imperialism and its governments is very dubious and confused, and they are expressions of its crisis. Because a president of the USA, who is saying anything, is expressing the economic and political crisis of the capitalist power. That he has to be making this speech for the tribune and his ultra-reactionary and racist social base.
Tariffs, trade wars, aggravate the capitalist economic crisis
How far will Trump go? Guillermo Moreno, a Peronist, praised him (sic) for being “protectionist.” Trump said: “we are going to defend the industry” and “we are going to put tariffs on everyone”. He launched the slogan “If you don’t want tariffs, come and produce in the US”.
This slogan has little to do with the reality of the capitalist crisis and how decadent imperialist capitalism is. So, it is just words for an audience that wants something done. Because the US has been experiencing years of decline in its basic industries. Especially the automobile industry, linked to the steel industry. Trump speaks to this audience of workers, mostly white, unemployed or with low wages. The famous area that voted for him a lot, the old “steel belt”, the old automotive factories of Detroit or the steel mills, which have been in a very marked decline for decades. Imperialism in its crisis has colonized or semi-colonized other countries so that its multinationals can make super profits with higher exploitation rates. And that is why for 40 years the American, European and other multinationals have moved to China. There are more than 80 thousand multinationals in capitalist China, under the red flag dictatorship of the Communist Party. They exploit their workers. With salaries of 100 or 200 dollars, recently raised to 300 dollars due to strikes. In the imperialist countries they must pay salaries of 3 thousand or 4 thousand dollars to an industrial worker, more if he is specialised.
What is the reality of “come here”, to whom is Trump saying, come here and who is going to go to the US? In Mexico, there is a large automotive industry which mainly exports cars to the US. Does anyone know a Mexican car or model? There is no such thing as a Mexican car, there are Ford, General Motors, or Chrysler models.
Elon Musk, who is the first or second world’s billionaire, has Tesla’s largest electric car factory in China. Last year, Tesla held a party at the factory in China because 3 million electric cars were purchased. In a world with approximately 8 billion inhabitants.
So, is Tesla going to close the Tesla factory in China where they make hundreds of thousands of cars a year? Last year, Canada had imposed a 100 per cent tariff on cars imported from China. Now, what brand were the Chinese cars? They were Tesla. This shows the contradictions of capitalism. Elon Musk is a staunch supporter of the Trump government and complains when tariffs are applied in Canada or Europe.
In other words, we are talking about Elon Musk, who is a government official, who was at the inauguration with the other billionaires. Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, was there. Now, where does Apple make its iPhones? 95 per cent in China, a very small production in the US. Are they going to put tariffs on iPhones? Are they going to close factories in China or India, where they make millions of iPhones a year? It seems difficult.
Another case: Nike and its sneakers. It established in China in 1981. Almost 50 years ago. How many factories does Nike have in China? 2 or 3? It has 195 factories. This has to do with the crisis of capitalism, with the fact that multinationals are not interested in the “national industry” of the US, they are only interested in their profits. That is why there is a world disorder and a permanent decline. They go to China, where a capitalist dictatorship guarantees them a tremendous pace. In one of the factories, which is Taiwanese (on top of that, there is talk of a possible war in Taiwan), it is FoxCom, which is associated with Apple and makes 300 cell phones per minute.
Now Nike: Are they going to open the 195 factories in the US? To bring them to the US as Trump claims? Are they going to put tariffs on Nike shoes all over the world, fake or real? So, there is a huge contradiction between capitalism and reality, or is it just rhetoric? If they put tariffs on Nike shoes or Apple phones, on cars imported from Mexico, there will be tremendous inflation in the US. The American shoe industry has already told Trump the same thing: 70 per cent of shoes are produced in China. No way they can produce that on American soil.
The toy factory, Basic Fun, has been in China for 30 or 40 years. It has already told Trump, it is in the newspapers, that it is impossible to start producing Barbies or Care Bears in the US “Not in 12 months or ever.” This is the reality. So, what is Trump talking about?
The contradictions in his bourgeois plan are obvious. If tariffs were actually applied, it would detonate inflation in the US and the standard of living of the masses would continue to fall. The promise of the “golden age” is far from reality. In addition, this would aggravate the global capitalist crisis: trade wars, tariffs, crises. He will deepen the global crisis that will harm us, the workers and the people. There is an element they do not count on: the struggle of the masses, of the working people, in the USA and in the world.
The reasons why a far-right politician like Trump came to power are the same as those why he left the government in 2020
The reasons why Trump came to power would be the same as those why Trump lost the 2020 elections. We must not forget that Trump broke a tradition that American bourgeois democracy has, which is that presidents are generally re-elected. Obama was re-elected, Trump was not re-elected, and of course Biden/Harris was not either. It meets that standard. The defeat of the Democrats and Harris is part of this same reason why Trump lost. It is the wear and tear of the bourgeois parties, in this case the two great imperialist bourgeois parties. The “American dream” collapsed, the American middle class and the American working class collapsed.
It is also good to remember that there is one more ingredient as to why Trump lost. He fell because of the great mobilisation of millions against the police murder of the African-American George Floyd. There was an anti-racist rebellion never seen in the US before. That hit and weakened Trump. That also shows the weakness of these far-right governments and the power of the masses. When Trump left in May 2020, they destroyed this fascist, electorally. But Biden falls electorally, because since Obama, the decline of the US is the decline of its people. For example, in the US 37 million people, 11 per cent of the population, live in poverty. Movies, series, and news show a rising US homelessness problem.
This is an interesting reflection made by Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winner in economics in the US and one of the most prominent columnists of The NY Times. That after 25 years, he retired and wrote one last column. And it is interesting what he said, he compared when he started writing his column in 2000 to how the US is 25 years later. Anger and resentment replaced the optimism that him saw in the people, in the Americans, in 2000 “.” And another definition he makes is that “there is a collapse in the confidence of the elites” (Clarin, Argentina, 11 December 2024). A pro-capitalist journalist like him reflects well the crisis of the US and the world, because this collapse of the confidence of the elites is global. Milei also arrived in Argentina because there was a political “collapse,” if we take Paul Krugman’s definition, “of the elites.” Because the workers, the popular sectors no longer believe in employer governments and it is a phenomenon that extends worldwide. And that has to do with the growth of poverty and misery, of inequality. The latest data on global social inequality, which is growing, is that 1 per cent of the world’s population, or 56 million people, own 46 per cent of the wealth of the world, which has 8 billion inhabitants. Among the 10 richest in the world, we see those who govern together with Trump.
The growing trend of the far right in the world has as its background the frustrations of the masses with their capitalist governments and politicians
The growth of the far right is a matter of logical concern, where the US, Argentina, and the world are going. Trump, Milei, or Meloni are fascists, individually they are fascists. Another thing is whether there is already fascism, this is very important. Bolsonaro, Trump, Meloni, and similar leaders’ ascents reflect public frustrations, as Krugman notes. We, the revolutionary socialists, define them as the rupture of millions in the world and different expressions in each country, with their parties and their political leaders. Many are worried, saying that “democracy is entering a crisis”, that people are favouring authoritarian regimes. We do not see it that way. It depends on what we want to say. What is in crisis is what Paul Krugman says, the bourgeois elites. It is the crisis of bourgeois democracy; it is the crisis of of a savage and exploitative capitalism. Because they cannot solve the crisis, their tools are the permanent austerity applied to the people. Those are the plans of the multinationals, the IMF, the World Bank, etc.
The working class and the popular sectors are confused as there is still no clear socialist alternative in the world, neither for the elections nor for the struggle. We are still in a process of reconstruction, for the liquidation of what was called socialism in the 20th century. It was not socialism but a false socialism, it was Stalinism. Maduro, the reincarnation of a Stalinist as bourgeois. So, logically, the working class sees a fake leftist, Daniel Ortega, imprisoning and killing people. Or many in Argentina who believe Cristina Kirchner or Peronism are “the left”. We are fighting this confusion to build an alternative, to reach the working class, the popular sectors, the youth, to explain what the underlying reality is.
So, what is in crisis is bourgeois democracy, parliaments, governments, employers’ justice. These far-right sectors use these crises to talk about the “caste” and falsely present themselves as something politically different. When they are part of the exploitative politicians and governments. But their government is still not fascism, they are still a political electoral phenomenon. This is very important, because there is a lot of discussion on the left, even in Trotskyism. There is a lot of fear in people, in our comrades, family, and friends, in Argentina it is concrete, Milei, where is it going? Is fascism coming?
So, this is the problem: Are we already reaching fascism? We say no, because the fascist regime is something else. It is important to clarify, fascism is a change of regime, fascism is Mussolini, Hitler, Videla. It is a coup, the working class is crushed, political and trade union freedoms are prohibited, all those who oppose it are imprisoned, disappeared … that is fascism. It was defeated when Mussolini was hanged in April 1945 in Italy, 80 years ago. But fascism is recreated, we experienced it in Latin America, in another form, under dictators, such as Videla or Pinochet.
Although for now there is no fascism, we cannot minimize that possibility. No, Milei is a danger, Trump is a danger. We must fight to defeat them.
There are sectors of Peronism and also of the left that minimize Milei, arguing that “it is not fascism” and, sometimes, they oppose raising “anti-fascist” slogans.
Trump, Milei, Meloni, or Le Pen aspire to fascism and hence, they are a danger, but, for now, they are not. Elon Musk is Trump’s right-hand man, he gave the Nazi salute and openly calls for people to vote for the neo-Nazi party in Germany in the February elections. This caused hundreds of thousands to take to the streets in Germany to repudiate Musk and the neo-Nazis. We have to explain all this to our comrades. Trump lost the elections in 2020 and could not impose a fascist dictatorship. Bolsonaro too, and he is even now on trial and banned from running, and they also attempted a failed coup in Brazil. So, it is not fascism, but it is a danger, which is why we have to repudiate them and fight. Because as Marxist revolutionaries Trotsky and also Nahuel Moreno always said, fascism is not discussed, it is destroyed by mobilisation.
So we are still in time, because for the moment they are an electoral phenomenon. They even lose elections because they do not have the conditions to impose dictatorships. Let’s look at the example of South Korea, that supposed pro-American bourgeois democracy. The president, a Milei from South Korea, lost the election.
He was elected in April of last year and was left in the minority in parliament and could not get a law passed that he wanted, so he started making Milei-type decrees, talking against gender equality and remembering the military that governed in the 1980s. Then one day in November he declared martial law, which suspended parliament, all freedoms, the right to protest, etc. It lasted only a few hours and at 4 in the morning he had to lift martial law because people took to the streets in Seoul, the capital. He had to resign, there were strikes and demonstrations. In South Korea, a country that has had bases with between 60 and 70 thousand permanent US soldiers for more than 60 years and they were unable to prevent these demonstrations. This man is on trial, and the prosecutors are debating between two sentences, life imprisonment, or death, with the death penalty. And now there is a provisional centre-left government that emerged from parliament. So, for now fascism is not happening and it will not happen if we mobilise.
The slogan “fascism cannot be discussed; it must be crushed with mobilisation,” is still valid
The far right must be defeated with mass mobilisations. Fascist regimes have not yet triumphed, neither in the US with Trump, nor in Argentina with Milei. But we cannot be complacent. That is why the general strikes that took place at the beginning of 2024 were important. Unfortunately, the CGT betrayed workers. University students also took to the streets by thousands. That is the way to defeat a Milei. Not the elections, we will go to the elections and we will see the votes to strengthen the Socialist Left and the LF-U (Left Front-Unity) as a political alternative, but to frustrate any truly fascist and counterrevolutionary attempt, we must promote struggles and the broadest unity of action to achieve it. As the George Floyd mobilisation prevented, which finally caused Trump to lose the 2020 election. That is the path that the American and world people and youth must take. The other example is the response of the Palestinian people against Trump and his bravado of wanting to expel them from Gaza. He received a resounding response. Trump said, people cannot live in this rubble, “we offer a reconstruction plan”, “they must all go to Jordan and Egypt”. At the same time, he said that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians returned to their homes in an incredible spectacle. It is moving what the Palestinian people do, with carts with mules, old cars, walking on bicycles, with their families, carrying blankets and mattresses. It is a mass mobilisation; it is part of their historic resistance. They all said “we are not leaving here”, “it is our home”, “it is our land”. That is the response to Trump and the Zionist fascists of Netanyahu and his government. They can continue killing, now in the West Bank, but they will not win because they could not defeat the Palestinian people. The Palestinian people are the clearest example of how the fascists can be defeated, eventually. As the Socialist Left and the IWU.FI, that is our conclusion, our role and our task. We are always trying to build an alternative of a revolutionary socialist political leadership, because the ultimate solution to all this social and humanitarian decadence, which exists in the USA, in Argentina and in the world, is socialism in each country and in the world, with democracy for the working people and the popular sectors. And for that, it is necessary to continue building a revolutionary socialist alternative.
